Archive for the 'Pseudoscience' Category

I don’t usually do lists, but I do find it interesting to look back over the past year and review major events and trends. It’s good for the memory, and the exercise always reminds me of how terrible memory is. I often realize that I forgot about major events, and also have a poor sense of how far in the past certain events occurred. (Was that this year or last year?)

So here are the pseudosciences from 2018 that I think deserve to be remembered. I am going to list them in no particular order, and just keep adding them until I run out of time.

Climate Change Denial

It does seem that 2018 may have been a bit of a turning point for the recognition that climate change is real, imminent, and deserving of far more attention and priority than we are giving it. There were multiple reports all agreeing that essentially the problem is worse than we thought, we have less time than we thought, and we better get cracking. The IPCC, for example, pointed out that even if we keep warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, an ambitious and probably not achievable goal, bad things will still happen, just not as bad if warming goes beyond that point. A US government report echoes this, adding that further warming will be economically damaging and it is cost-effective to prevent it rather than deal with the consequences.

Therefore, perhaps the worse pseudoscientists of 2018 is anyone still denying that climate change is a real problem that needs to be dealt with. The denialist strategies have not changed – no, the Earth is not warming, well if it is it’s not due to human causes, well even if we are causing it the results won’t be bad, well even if they will be bad there is nothing we can do about it anyway, and whatabout China? Like all pseudosciences they start with the desired conclusion – that we don’t need to do anything about it, just keep burning fossil fuels, and then they reverse engineer a justification for that conclusion.

Many people are complaining that CNN, in reporting on the recent E. coli outbreak on romaine lettuce, had The Food Babe (Vani Hari) on as a food “expert.” This, of course, is a complete journalistic failure on the part of CNN. The Food Babe is a famously scientifically illiterate alarmist whose career is based on peddling misinformation. My favorite example is when she completely misunderstood the nature of pressure in airline cabins, and complained that the air was tainted with up to 50% nitrogen.

As important as this complete scientific failure, was her response. She did not transparently correct the misinformation and apologize. She simply deleted the post.

Hari has come under extensive criticism for spouting her nonsense and fearmongering. She is perhaps most famous for her “yoga mat” stunt, completely misunderstanding the fact that chemicals can be used for a variety of reasons, and that does not make them dangerous.

Her general response to criticism is to (in addition to hiding) go on the attack. She does not appear to be an honest broker of information, but rather a self-promoter who will attack her critics. She also likes to ban critics from her own page. So when the internet complained to CNN that the Food Babe was not an appropriate person to have on their program to be presented as an expert, Hari did what she does – she went on the attack.

Her tactic this time is to blame the whole affair on “astroturfing.” This is a real phenomenon in which an industry, company, cult, or ideological group will create the impression of a grassroots campaign using front organizations and paid agents. However, this isn’t the whole story.

Last week I wrote about yet another claim for a possible location for Atlantis. This sparked some lively discussion, indicative of the fact that there is something alluring and iconic about the idea of Atlantis. I also think having a cool name is critical for such appeal (and not a small part of why Nostradamus, for example, is so iconic).

Long story short – there is no evidence that Atlantis existed, that Plato intended his writings to be an actual claim that Atlantis was real, and there is no evidence that the new supposed location, the Richat structure in Africa, is Atlantis or any ancient city.

In the comments, defenders of Atlantis made a claim, one that I have heard frequently before, that caught my interest.

One commenter wrote:

Atlantis a myth…?
Perhaps the story, but is the story based on something?

Let’s remember Troy was a myth until rediscovered in 1870.

Another:

They laughed at Heinrich Schliemann, but he found Troy and started, for the most part, the science of archaeology.

and:

back in 19th centrury(sic): The consensus of actual scholarship is that Troy is a myth.

Thank you Heinrich Schliemann for not caring about consensus.

The initial response by me and others was – so what? The logic here is not valid. Just because one city written about in ancient texts turned out to be real, that doesn’t mean they all are, or that Atlantis specifically is. Further, the analogy is not a good one.

A video is making the rounds claiming “proof” that Atlantis existed in norther Africa. This video is by Jimmy from Bright Insight and it is an excellent example of crank pseudoscience. Jimmy has made himself into a social media brand, with lots of conspiracy and pseudohistory nonsense to sell, but let’s focus on this one video for now.

The video follows a familiar format – gather together lots of circumstantial evidence, exaggerate its significance and specificity, ignore anything that doesn’t fit, ignore all genuine scholarship, and create the impression that you’re onto something. Essentially – blow a lot of smoke to convince the naive that there’s a fire.

His argument is essentially that the Richat structure, or the Eye of the Sahara, fits Plato’s description of Atlantis so well, it essentially amounts to proof.

First, let me start out by stating that the consensus of actual scholarship is that Atlantis is a myth. Plato never intended his description of Atlantis to be an actual claim that the city existed. He used it as an obvious rhetorical device – the evil empire that was vanquished by the morally pure Athenians, and wiped off the Earth by the wrath of the gods. The notion that knowledge of a nine thousand year old city (at his time) somehow came only to Plato, of all people, is itself a huge stretch. Further, no one at the time reacted to his description of Atlantis as if it were a real claim. All his contemporaries understood it to be a device, not a claim. Jimmy does not even address this fatal flaw in his argument.

As an American it’s very easy to look at issues from a narrow American-centric view (we have a well-earned reputation for this). I am often reminded of this by my many international SGU listeners, and I have had to discipline myself to keep this in mind.

For example, when it comes to teaching science in public schools, I do, of course, feel the most responsibility for my own backyard, but this is an important issue everywhere. But this is an issue in many countries, not just the US. Recent reports indicate that the teaching of evolution is under attack in Israel and Turkey. The Guardian also reports:

This news follows the astonishing statements made by India’s minister for higher education earlier this year. Satyapal Singh claimed Darwin was “scientifically wrong”, and is demanding that the theory of evolution be removed from school curriculums because no one “ever saw an ape turning into a human being”.

India has 1.35 billion people, which is 17.7% of the world population. (China is 1.4 billion, 18.5% – so India and China combined have 36.2% of the world population). I think it’s reasonable to say that it matters what happens in these countries, especially with our increasingly globalized world. Our efforts to curb climate change depend on cooperation from China and India, and having a scientifically literate population will help these efforts.

One of the persistent themes of this blog is that expertise matters. This is not to say the experts are always right (sometimes they disagree with each-other), and there is also a range of expertise, and different kinds of experts can have different biases and blind spots. But all things considered, someone who has formal expertise on a specific topic is likely to know much more about that topic than someone who has read about it on the internet.

Further, most people underestimate the amount of knowledge that exists on a topic, and therefore the vast gulf of knowledge that exists between them and the experts. In fact, the more someone knows about a topic the more they understand how much is known, and the more humble they tend to be with respect to their own knowledge. The flip side of this – people who know little tend to overestimate their relative knowledge – is an established psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Operationally Dunning and Kruger found in their study that the lower someone performed on a test of knowledge, the greater the gap between their perceived knowledge and performance and their actual performance. At around the 80th percentile and above, people tend to underestimate their relative knowledge. Below that point they tend to increasingly overestimate it, and everyone thinks they are above 50%.

Etzel Cardeña has published an extensive review of parapsychology concluding that it is both plausible and supported by evidence. It stands, in my opinion, as an excellent example of everything that is wrong with psi research. There is a lot of meat to go through, but I want to focus in this article on his use of quantum mechanics to justify the plausibility of ESP and psi phenomena.

Psi, or anomalous cognition, is a group of alleged phenomena that include sensing what other people are thinking, viewing remote locations not accessible to the normal senses, and predicting the future in some way. These claims are inherently implausible because there is no way to account for them with known phenomena. They appear, therefore, to violate well-established laws of physics. Therefore, any reasonable scientists would argue, the threshold of evidence needed before concluding that a psi phenomenon is real should be very high. What we have is very low-grade evidence at best, therefore it is reasonable to reject claims for psi.

Psi proponents, therefore, attack the two pillars of this rejection – that psi is implausible, and that the evidence is low-grade. Cardeña is no exception, and that is precisely what he is trying to do in his paper. He fails on both counts, producing only a string of cherry-picked evidence, selected quotes that can be made to seem as if they support his position, and very strained logic.

What do we mean by plausibility? This is actually a deceptively complex question. Plausibility essentially means, if we had to guess, based on everything we know so far about the universe, is a specific claim likely to be true? There is a very broad range of plausibility, and unfortunately often people refer to plausibility as a false dichotomy, that a claim is either plausible or not. This dichotomy obscures a vast spectrum, which matters because we deal with different locations on that spectrum very differently.

A recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Krista Burton is perhaps one sign of recent social trends – increasing belief in things like astrology, especially among millennials. Burton provides some insight into this phenomenon, but then also makes some horrible justifications for it.

Belief in astrology, the notion that the relative positions of planets and start affect our personality and perhaps our destiny, has been measured at about 25% in the UK, Canada and US in recent decades. However, as researchers, Nicholas Campion, points out, the number depends greatly on what exactly you ask:

In one of my groups – of mostly male students aged 18 to 21 – I found that 70% read a horoscope column once a month and 51% valued its advice. Other questions produced a huge variation: 98% knew their sun sign, 45% thought it described their personalities, 25% said it can make accurate forecasts, and 20% think the stars influence life on Earth. The higher figures are close to previous research which showed that 73% of British adults believe in astrology, while the lowest figures are similar to those found by Gallup’s polls.

It’s difficult to know how to parse all of that, but it seems like about half of people take astrology seriously to some extent, and 20-25% very seriously. That is a significant percentage of the population to believe in something which is 100% superstitious nonsense. Let’s get this out of the way now – there is no plausible mechanism by which astrology could work, there is no evidence that any form of astrology does work, and it is structured and functions like a classic pseudoscience. A moderate amount of scientific literacy, and a trace of critical thinking skills, should be enough to purge any belief in astrology.

Yeah – it’s deliberately misleading by distorting the facts and presenting them out of context so that they lead to a conclusion which is untrue. That is a form of lying.

Often I am asked how to sort science from fiction when there are many sides all loudly proclaiming opposing claims and citing their own evidence. (Gratuitous plug – for a thorough answer to this question, you can preorder my upcoming book.) One good way is to take any specific argument and follow the evidence as far as you can. Try to get back to primary sources, and see what they actually say. Follow the arguments back and forth, and see which side tends to have the final word.

Typically the side with the weaker position, or the one that is more ideological and less science-based, will display common characteristic behaviors. They will misrepresent primary sources – say, by citing a study to support a claim, when it doesn’t, or blatantly misrepresenting what the study shows. They will also cherry pick evidence, ignoring solid evidence that seems to contradict their position. When firmly challenged on one point, they may simply shift over to a separate point, without ever responding to or acknowledging the challenge. And – they will lie.

Last week I wrote about a recent article claiming evidence for panspermia (the idea that life had limited origins and then seeded itself throughout the galaxy), and the underlying idea of panspermia itself. I concluded that the new paper provided no compelling evidence, and panspermia, while not impossible, is a fringe hypothesis with no credible supporting evidence.

In response one of the co-authors of the paper (Ted Steele) wrote me an e-mail, attempting to defend the paper. I welcome the opportunity to engage in a dialogue about any topic I blog about, and so here is my response. Here is the e-mail in full:

Dear Steven:

I can see you have got quite emotional (attached) – and I am sure you are therefore not thinking straight. I tried posting this reply to your Blog comment but for technical reasons( I think ) I was excluded. So I decided to email you directly and share my response with some of your academic colleagues.

I suggest you re-read our paper carefully as you read this note. See https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2018.03.004

I am a molecular immunologist and evolutionist of 50 years standing. I am also the lead author of this paper on the “Cause of the Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? ” I do not publish scientific trivia, and apart from key books the main body of my work is published in peer reviewed journals – check me on PubMed searching “Steele EJ”. Many of my PDFs are also at my academia.edu site (below). My main field is the study of the RNA and DNA editing mechanisms in the somatic hypermutation and germline evolution of antibody variable genes – however I am very interested in pragmatically evaluating the evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe Panspermia explanatory paradigm.

I have spent 10 years or more poring over and thinking about all the multifactorial evidence and all the explanations and criticisms. I expect serious critics to do what I have done – confront all the “extraordinary ” evidence in conflict with the terrestrial paradigm. Most of my co-authors have done that. Skeptics must do this – confront and evaluate the evidence and the primary literature. Here some examples from our paper, which are paradigm shifting (that is, pure nonsense under the terrestrial neo-Darwinism paradigm).

We now have a set of extraordinary facts to explain. The usual skeptical response in these situations is that “Extraordinary Explanations require Extraordinary Evidence’. The situation now is the reverse. Extraordinary, and multifactorial evidence exists now on Earth and its immediate environs. So now we must provide an “Extraordinary” explanation that fits all these facts and makes sense of them – this has been the aim of Science since time immemorial.

Four extraordinary set of biological facts are speaking for themselves:

• Bacteria in the cosmic dust on the external surface of the International Space Station

• Tardigrades

I have not added a list of other data, including space hardy biological data, Mars data, nor the Octopus RNA editing data, because I do not need to – four , quite unrelated, data sets are enough for biological significance. ( Statistical significance does not enter the picture). The skeptic and traditional Astrophysicist now needs to provide a convincing explanation of these data sets that avoids Panspermia.

I am a pragmatic Popperian – I deal in hard facts that require a unifying explanation.